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Indore’s Rajwada Palace

There has been an interesting trend brewing across several colleges in Indore offering graduate courses. Top companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture and L&T; (ECC) hire graduates as trainees and later help them pursue higher education from the best of institutions. And it’s not engineering graduates that these companies are hiring, even a BA or BSc graduate can lap up a job with them. After the training, the companies identify their area of interest and help them attain a higher degree in that discipline.

Indore Professional Studies Academy (IPSA) that offers both graduate and undergraduate programmes has observed the trend since 2006. Convergys was the first company that came to us in 2006 with a request for hiring undergraduate students. They hired around 13 students that year and since then, the number of companies campus has gradually risen, said Atul Bharat, placement officer at IPSA.

Companies see fresh graduates as trainees that can be moulded easily into their style of working. Students benefit greatly as not only do they get to learn the ground realities of the profession early in their career but also get to earn a reasonable salary. Recently, Nestle offered an annual package of Rs 4.75 lakh to a BSc (Biotechnology) student from the college, Bharat added.

The long-term benefit of such a recruitment is getting a chance to pursue higher studies. Most of these companies have collaborations with institutes such as BITS Pilani, XLRI School of Business and Human Resources (XLRI) and Symbiosis International University. In most cases, the companies fund the entire cost of the course.

Dr Mandeep Gill, professor in-charge-of placements at Maharaja Ranjit Singh College of Professional Sciences in Indore said, There are close to 450 students in our undergraduate courses. Every year, the number of companies coming to recruit graduates is increasing. Every company has their own criteria for providing an MBA degree. In some cases, they may fund 70-75% of the course and in others they may go up to 85-90%.

Every company has a different policy as to how much of time a graduate recruit has to work before he/she is eligible to pursue higher education under the guidelines of the company, Bharat said. Most companies give the trainees one year to settle down in their jobs and decide if they want to pursue a degree in higher education.

Gujarati Samaj College, Prestige Institute and Pioneer Institute of Professional Studies are some of the other Institutes in Indore, which have witnessed this trend over the past few years.

Companies mostly start the recruitment process in December-January. Our undergraduate courses including BSc, BBA and BCom have almost 1,000 students on roll. While in 2006, IPSA saw Convergys as the single company that recruited 13 candidates, the count has gone up to six companies including L&T;, NIIT and Deloitte that hired 44 students in 2011, while offering jobs to almost 200 undergraduate students at the institute. This year NIIT, Cognizant, TCS, IGAT PATNI, Accenture, Infosys and Tech Mahindra have already visited us and hired 400 students, shared Dr SL Kale, admissions director at IPS Academy.

SR Singh, HR at L&T; (ECC) said, One of the major reasons behind recruiting fresh graduates is that it restricts the inter company movement that youngsters are prone to these days. In addition to this, if a student takes up an MBA degree, his mind gets set onto a particular field, which then becomes the only area where he/she can work. However, recruiting fresh graduates ensure that we have talent that can be moulded in the fields that we require. We also offer them the chance for super specialisation through executive MBAs from BITS Pilani so that they become fully trained in the field of their choice.

He added that the trend of hiring graduates is taking place in almost all tier-B cities in the country. It is a PAN-India movement but Indore is one of the first centres where we began recruiting graduates and so the trend remains strong here, Singh said.

While companies hire BA graduates for administrative and HR jobs, they hire commerce graduates to take up management and accounting jobs and BSc students are recruited for the jobs of technicians and software developers. Graduates join as trainees and are promoted according to their performance.

However, the trend is facing a few issues in its application. One of the major problems is the lack of counselling and guidance that graduate students have in terms of their career. Most students believe that completing their higher education would get them a better and higher-paying job than what they would get post completing their graduation, Bharat said.

In this regard, we caught up with Ali Asagar, a 2011 batch BSc (Computer Science) student from IPS Academy who got job offers from three top IT companies including NIIT, TCS and PATNI but instead decided to pursue an MCA degree from Acropolis Institute of Technology and Research in Indore. The major reason why I did not take up any of the jobs was that I did not think I was ready to handle an IT job after completing graduation. I feel that a specialisation is necessary to handle a job well. I even discussed the matter with my parents and elder brother. They gave me freedom to choose what I wanted to do but advised me that pursuing a higher education degree would get me a much better paying job, he said.

Ali added that the companies were offering him the option of pursuing either an MS degree from BITS Pilani or an Executive MBA from Symbiosis. They told him that the classes would be held over the weekends. The company would not have given him any time off for studies. Thus, his schedule would include working five days a week followed by weekend MBA classes, held by the respective institute.

I do not think I could have handled such extreme pressure, Ali shared. He said that he was offered an average package of Rs 2.15 lakh. However, after completing his MCA degree with Acropolis, he was hoping to start off with an annual salary of Rs 3.5 lakh. I have taken into account the fee structure of Rs 60,000 per year that I would be paying for my MCA degree. I feel I have taken up the correct option, Ali stated.

On the other hand, students who have joined jobs immediately after graduation have a different take on it. I completed my graduation in BSc (Computer Science) from IPS Academy in 2011 and joined PATNI three months ago. I have joined as a System Associate and after one year I will be promoted to the post of a Software Engineer. I am enjoying the experience of becoming a working graduate and learning a lot. In addition, PATNI has given me the option of pursuing an MBA degree from BITS Pilani after I complete one year with the company and I have full plans to take up that option, Yusuf Ali said.

So, while companies are looking to recruit more graduates, students seem unsure about the advantages of joining jobs just after graduation. How far this trend continues, only time will tell.